Drawing Offered Hope In 19th Century

January 8, 1986|By Edward J. Sozanski, KNT News Service

The history of art in America is more than the sum of the various native ''schools'' and acknowledged masters. It's also the story of 19th-century Americans seized by a craving to draw, of the founding of art schools to teach them how, and of the Centennial Exposition of 1876, where the drawing craze reached its apotheosis.

As Diana Korzenik, a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art, says in her new book, Drawn to Art, working-class Americans flocked to drawing classes because they came to regard drawing as a skill that promised the sort of social and economic rewards now ascribed to computer literacy.

The drawing craze developed as a handmaiden of the Industrial Revolution. As the United States became more industrialized and more conscious of its national identity, a strong sense of rivalry with Europe, especially with England, emerged. Americans wanted to make products and develop technical skills that would equal anything European. Drawing came to be regarded as an essential skill toward that end, like reading, writing and arithmetic.

When Korzenik came to the Massachusetts College of Art 12 years ago she was asked to develop a course in the history of American art education. She took the job not knowing much about Massachusets College, ''but I did know it was the first school in America founded to create a generation of working- class artists,'' she recalled.

As she collected old drawing manuals and sketchbooks as research material, she began first to perceive the scope of the drawing phenomenon and then to wonder what it meant.

''The more I read these funny little pamphlets, the more I began to realize what art meant to 19th-century working-class America,'' Korzenik said. ''I was picking up clues that drawing and art were considered kind of a national salvation, not only in a spiritual way but as an economic solution to the balance of trade. I wanted to write a book about it, but I didn't know how. Then an amazing thing happened.''

In 1981, Roberta Carr, an antiques dealer in Concord, N.H., who knew of Korzenik's interest in 19th-century art manuals, invited her to inspect five boxes of material that were to be included in an auction of household effects. The boxes contained drawings, watercolors and sketchbooks that had been made and used by three children in the Joseph Cross family of Merrimack, N.H. Since children's drawings from the 19th century have rarely survived, Korzenik realized immediately that she had come upon a treaure.

She bought the books and drawings and subsequently met Cross descendants who had more material in the family homestead in Merrimack. From the documents and hours of conversation during visits to Merimack, she extracted Drawn to Art.

The book, published by University Press of New England, is not so much art history as social history and biography. In recounting the story of the Cross children and their parents, Korzenik shows how art became an intimate part of the lives of one New England farm family, and how their experiences typified what was going on elsewhere in the country.

The lives of the three Cross children coincided with the boom in art instruction. That the two sons went on to become graphic artisans seemed to prove the theory about drawing ability being a key to success in life. (Their sister became a teacher and attended art school in Boston.) But the boom eventually busted around the turn of the century as ideas about art changed, and both men were to lose their jobs when wood engraving become obsolete.

The drawing boom, which began in Massachusetts, rolled into high gear with the passage of the Drawing Act there. The municipal government in Boston hired Walter Smith, who had developed a system of art instruction in England, to develop a program for that city. Smith also became state director of art education, and soon his program was disseminated across the state.

Smith's system for teaching drawing reflected the 19th-century conviction that everyone could, and should, learn to draw. ''His premise was that drawing was two-dimensional and that you should build your skills from two dimensions,'' Korzenik explained.

''His method started with very simple geometrical exercises like triangles and squares, with transitions into volumes and then into design elements. It was all copy work, absolute measurement and accuracy -- no variation in pencil pressure was allowed -- but everyone learned to do it and everyone did it.''